1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods and apparatuses for computer-based education. More particularly, the invention relates to a computer-based assessment of an individual's educational performance relative to selected comparative norms.
2. Description of the Related Art
Educational software that tests a user's knowledge, coupled with the immediate scoring of answers, is well-known in the art. For home use, a wide range of software is directed to various age groups, although the primary audience is grade-school children. Thus, many educational programs are designed to be quite entertaining, with built-in tests being played as games having an underlying educational purpose. Accordingly, terms such as "student," "player," or "test-taker" shall be understood to mean any participant in, or user of, educational software that tests the user's knowledge in a formal or informal manner.
Software which blends both fun and learning is often referred to as "edutainment" software. Popular edutainment programs include "Mathblaster," "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego," and "Word Munchers." These edutainment programs (as well as certain other educational programs generally) present players with a series of increasingly difficult tests or puzzles, wherein players must correctly solve the present round before they are allowed to continue to the next round of play.
In the above-mentioned edutainment software, each player exists in isolation from all other players. This arrangement is reasonably well-suited to informal, isolated learning, but lacks the comprehensive data collection/comparison features needed for formal test administration. For example, without an on-line database of scores, there is no way for a user of educational software to compare his test score with other users' scores. Such inter-player comparisons are useful for assessing accuracy and speed of answers. Comparatives can be calculated and distributed for any given test as a whole, for groups of related questions or for individual questions. Examples of comparisons are as follows: Is a score of 2,350 in Mathblaster a good score for a ten year old? For a fourteen year old? How did all fifth graders do on Level 4 of the multiplication section? Or, in "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego," is a student at the sixth grade level for naming U.S. state capitols but only at a third grade level for naming foreign countries? Finally, how do these scores vary by school district, state, or perhaps even for children in the same school or class?
Certain home education software applications allow users to be tutored by the software before having to answer a specific question or solve a problem. Still other home education software applications detect specific areas where a user is making errors and automatically adjusts the question type and/or information screens to help the user improve on his weaknesses, after which he is re-tested. This capability permits the software to adjust to the skill strengths and weaknesses of an individual user when measured against predetermined (e.g., programmed into the software at the time of manufacture) and absolute (e.g., percentage of questions answered correctly) norms. However, a drawback of the existing home education software is that it cannot take into account relative norms (e.g., comparisons among a group of users currently taking the test), because of the lack of an on-line database of scores, as mentioned previously.
Another drawback of the existing home education software is that standardized entertainment elements often become repetitive and boring after seeing them for the third or fourth time. Absent rewards or external competitions of some kind, children often stop using the software once the novelty has worn off. Yet, currently available software lacks a reliable and accurate award recognition system that allows a parent to track and reward her child's performance. Such a reward could be contingent on achievement of a standardized norm, as discussed previously. For example, the parent might offer her child a new bicycle in return for the child's achieving mastery of fourth grade reading skills. However, the parent would have to watch the child each time the child finished a test to make sure that the child had indeed scored at the fourth grade level or higher. Thus, there exists a need for educational software that can certify a child's performance against a specified norm without requiring the child's parent to witness or supervise the child's test-taking. Furthermore, if the parent wanted to relate his child's performance to the scores of other children in the same school, grade, or age group, there is no way to determine whether the score achieved by the child meets those comparative criteria.
Finally, current educational software does not allow a parent to define customized reward programs. For example, in a math program having many different modules for different areas, the parent might wish to reward his child for achieving average performance on all modules and superior performance on at least two modules. The measurement of such performance relative to the performance of other children at other locations and times would require an elaborate tracking system.
Another category of educational software runs on networked mainframe-and-terminal systems for large-scale, simultaneous testing of groups of students at fixed locations. In contrast to the edutainment programs, these centralized systems require a human being (e.g., a parent, teacher, or other proctor) to monitor individual users of the software to prevent cheating. The software subsequently retains scores in a local database which allows a teacher to recognize the best students and to ensure that all students have achieved certain minimum requirement levels. Such systems are well-suited for formal testing, but are ill-suited for home-based educational testing because of their hardwired, inflexible configurations and because of the continuous human monitoring requirement.
Yet another category of software is used for a computerized evaluation of standardized tests taken by school children using paper forms. Groups of students simultaneously record their answers to paper-based, multiple-choice questions by blackening ovals on Scantron forms which are optically scanned for grading by software running on computers. A standard paper report is then generated and distributed to each student. These reports, such as the Connecticut Mastery Test administered in the Connecticut primary and secondary schools, or the more widely known SATs, measure a student's comparative performance against all others in his school district as well as in his state. Although these testing systems provide teachers and parents with an evaluative, reliable comparison as to how the student is performing versus his peers, they suffer from other shortcomings that make them illsuited to home-based educational testing. First, the testing methodology (reading printed questions and blackening ovals) is cumbersome and rigid. Second, the methodology does not allow the setting of local performance criteria apart from standardized (but relative) norms programmed into a central mainframe computer. Finally, because the entire test must be taken and submitted to a central computer for grading before test results are returned to the test-takers, there is no interactive feedback mechanism in which future test questions are selected in accordance with ongoing or historical performance.
Furthermore, all of the aforementioned software is ill-suited for at-home testing because the lack of a mechanism to reliably associate a test-taker with his answers allows a dishonest test-taker to obtain test answers from another test-taker. Thus, even the sophisticated hard-wired testing systems typically require human proctoring to ensure security--a condition that may not be available in geographically distributed home testing applications.
Finally, in many instances, a teacher or central authority might want to distribute tests in electronic format for students to take on their home computers. Requiring a simultaneous start time and/or deadline completion for all tested students is necessary to deter cheating in the form of test-taker substitution or a later test-taker obtaining an earlier test-taker's answers to the same test. However, current software does not allow such a configuration.